So today I shut down my computer before I left for work, upon my return I turned on the computer however I'm getting this message "Reboot and Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot Device and press a key" I have already went into BIOS and made sure that my primary sata drive is the first to boot, and second is the cd drive. Any help would be appreciated, I really can't afford to lose any data on this HDD.

is it actually detecting in the BIOS?
make sure all the connections are tight.
plug it into another computer or hook it up through USB to see if there's accessable data on it.
if you have a card reader make sure there's no cards in it.

agreed ^^

re seat the hdd cables. Try again. If nothing was changed in the bios then it wouldnt be that but always check to eliminate.

may be a bad hdd.

I disconnected then reconnected everything. The sata drive is being recognized in BIOS.

So the computer is clearly trying to boot from the IDE drive because when I insert the windows CD it automatically will launch it without me having to select boot from CD.

Either way take out all the dvd drives and see what it does, and if you have another computer see if there is anything actually on the drive at all.

I do not have another computer that can read sata drives.

So i took out the IDE HDD out of my other PC and put it in the one I was having problems with, now when I boot it up it shows the windows XP loading bar but then a blue screen will pop up and says " A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.
If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer. Remove any newly installed hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK /F to check for harddrive corruption, and then restart your computer"

Technical Information: ***STOP: 0X0000007B (0xBACC3524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000.)

The IDE hard drive works fine in my other PC.... is maybe my Mobo toast?

reseat the ram.

Didn't change anything.

well its passing post so it would be unlikely. I would inspect the board for swollen caps.

If the hard drive is perfectly fine in another pc, then I would re seat everything that you can re seat, including cpu, video card, sound card etc etc.

Is there a way to test if the HD is fine without testing in another PC since I do not have one? and what exactly is a swollen cap?

It's a capacitor that doesn't look like every other capacitor.

also tap F8 on boot and see if you can get into windows in safe mode, if you can, then windows more than likely went tits up - back up your data wipe and reload.

when pressing F8 on boot it just asks me what i want to boot from, no option to boot in safe mode, how do i backup without getting into the OS?

it will give you several options, first is safe mode. I would also try Last known good configuration as well - it may get you to desktop.

if you can get there back up your data.

otherwise you need another pc to slave your os drive into.